Dammit.

For years now (since I was working at Mole Valley, so at least sixteen years) I've been thinking about a novel in which Doctor Pretorius and the Bride of Frankenstein escape from the exploding laboratory and journey through Europe. I have a chunk of it somewhere, in longhand on pages from a spiral-bound notebook, and I wrote a short story featuring the same characters in present time, my first and only professionally published work so far, in the anthology Thoroughly Modern Monsters (still available from Story Spring Publishing).

Tonight I discover that in 2007 Elizabeth Hand published a novel based on exactly the same premise, Pandora's Bride. Licenced by Universal, no less.

Mine would have been funnier.

But still, dammit.

An odd idea

Sparked by discussion of Martin Shkreli:

Assuming one could get it done, what would be the positive and negative effects of making intellectual property legally inalienable? By which I mean, impossible to sell outright (I suppose there would be no way of stopping people like me giving away their rights). All patents and copyrights would be vested in their originators and their heirs in perpetuity, anyone who wanted to sell derived products would have to lease the rights directly for fixed periods, and nobody could trade speculatively in such things as Shkreli has done. I'm sure there must be a downside, but I can't see one. (I am not interested in whether there would be a downside for large corporations. Just for human beings.)

Any thoughts?